Questioning Transphobia writers are fundraising: Lisa and I are both struggling to survive. Both of us are unemployed. I don’t have money for food this next fortnight, let alone internet or hormone treatments. Lisa has a staph infection she can’t afford to see a doctor for, and no money for hormones either.

Forget Cinderella, Find Fred Astaire (changethis.com/manifesto/show/76.01.ForgetCinderella): Why have companies worked so hard at improving the gender balance with such unsatisfactory results? Because the approach taken was to focus their efforts on the wrong part of the problem: women. It’s time to stop asking what’s the matter with women that they aren’t making it to the top? and start asking what’s the matter with our organization if we can’t recruit, retain, and promote the majority of the educated talent in the world today?

Why it matters: [The women] were complaining how silly it was that we were constantly talking about how great it was that there were more women speakers at this conference than any other year… My first thought was a flash of anger. And then I recalled that not very long ago, I was just like them.

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I demonstrated an aptitude for computers when I was a young girl, but I didn’t have home Internet access until I graduated from high school. I blame the Patriarchy, partly.

By the time I was in high school, I was usually the only person in my classes who didn’t have any Internet access, while most of my peers had high-speed access. When my peers communicated with each other through e-mail and chat, I was shut out of the social conversation and didn’t understand the “technical” terms they were using. I understood the creative potential of being able to communicate with computer users all over the world. I knew that Internet access would allow me to communicate with others without my social anxiety getting in the way. However, my father was hard-set against the idea of “the Internet”.

For five years, I was part of a persistent family campaign to convince my father that we should get Internet access. He thought that the Internet was a software program that was just a “fad” and would go out of style. Back then, the mainstream media was even more confused than now about what “the Internet” was. The news sensationalized stories about online predators luring young girls through “the Internet” to rape them. The implied moral of these news stories was that the Internet was dangerous and full of sexual predators.

My father did not work in an office then, so he heard more about “the Internet” through his coworkers. One male coworker basically explained to my father that The Internet Is For Porn. My father came home and told us that he was never going to let us have Internet access, because girls especially should be protected from exposure to pornography.

Say hello to Ms Spam-Spam! We’ve put in a special account for linkspams to make it more clear that linkspams are a group effort here. All the old linkspams are now listed with this account too.

Most Big-Company Women CEOs Are Also Mothers. Sadly, this isn’t a sign that motherhood + career isn’t difficult: “The fact most big-company female CEOs have children may just state the obvious—that the highest achievers can handle big challenges”

Intui has a nice infographic up: Payroll by Gender: Who Makes More Money? Most of this is moderately well-known stats (at least within feminist circles), but it’s nicely put together and the section that gave pay divided up by gender and ethnicity was fairly interesting.

The Cranky Product Manager is cranky: “Software Sisters, add your own experiences in the comments!”

The Awesome Foundation is running a programming workshop for girls, which will have them “design, program, and produce their own video games based on situations, systems, or relationships in their own lives”.

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These studies, all published in English between 1990 and 2007, looked at people from grade school to college and beyond. A second portion of the new study examined the results of several large, long-term scientific studies, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

In both cases, Hyde says, the difference between the two sexes was so close as to be meaningless.

The idea that both genders have equal math abilities is widely accepted among social scientists, Hyde adds, but word has been slow to reach teachers and parents, who can play a negative role by guiding girls away from math-heavy sciences and engineering. “One reason I am still spending time on this is because parents and teachers continue to hold stereotypes that boys are better in math, and that can have a tremendous impact on individual girls who are told to stay away from engineering or the physical sciences because ‘Girls can’t do the math.'”

There is a common idea that women are underrepresented in tech startups because we are “nurturing and not risk-taking enough by nature”, an idea often proposed and upvoted in Hacker News discussions. Roy F. Baumeister, Professor of Psychology, also argues something similar in his defense of Lawrence Summers’ hypothesis that fewer women than men have high innate ability in science. Professor Baumeister argues that men evolved to take risks, and women evolved to play it safe, because we are allegedly descendants of risk-taking men and risk-averse women.

However, there are a few problems with this explanation of why women are underrepresented among tech entrepreneurs. One problem is that top venture capitalist John Doerr consciously and deliberately invests in tech startups run by white men over women and racial minorities, and even encourages other VCs to follow his lead. Even more, it is understood that this is “the way the venture-capital industry operates”. While other industries call this “stereotyping” or “profiling”, VCs call it “pattern recognition”. In other words, there is systemic discrimination in the tech industry based on gender, as well as race and age.

The phenomenal growth of women-owned businesses has made headlines for three decades—women consistently have been launching new enterprises at twice the rate of men, and their growth rates of employment and revenue have outpaced the economy.

Study Examines Gender Stereotypes In Job Applications: The researchers' prediction that modest male applicants would face hiring discrimination was not supported, however, and she speculates that because men's status is higher than women's, meek men are afforded the benefit of the doubt and are less likely to encounter hiring discrimination than dominant women.

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Often, computer geeks who started programming at a young age brag about it, as it is a source of geeky prestige. However, most computer geeks are oblivious to the fact that your parents being able to afford a computer back in the 1980s is a product of class privilege, notyour innate geekiness. Additionally, the child’s gender affects how much the parents are willing to financially invest in the child’s computer education. If parents in the 1980s think that it is unlikely their eight-year-old daughter will have a career in technology, then purchasing a computer may seem like a frivolous expense.

Because of systemic racism, class differences correlate with racial demographics. In the Racialicious post Gaming Masculinity, Latoya quotes a researcher’s exchange with an African American male computer science (CS) undergraduate:

“Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that. Now, the only thing that I have been doing since I was eight is playing basketball. I would own them on the court. I mean it wouldn’t be fair, they would just stand there and I would dominate. It is sort of like that in CS.”— Undergraduate CS Major

Those “other guys” in CS are those white, male geeks who brag in CS newsgroups about hacking away at their Commodore 64s as young children, where successive posters reveal younger and younger ages in order to trump the previous poster. This disgusting flaunting of privilege completely demoralizes those of us who gained computer access only recently. However, CS departments—which tend to be dominated by even more privileged computer geeks of an earlier era when computers were even rarer—also assume that early computer adoption is a meritocratic measure of innate interest and ability.

Thea Lim: Some Basic Racist Ideas and some Rebuttals, & Why We Exist: This kind of hey-let-me-help-you-achieve-your-goal-by-suggesting-you-be-more-radio-friendly response totally misunderstands (and appears disinterested) in the anti-racist project… Anti-racism and people of colour organizing is not about being friendly, being appealing, or educating white folks… the point of anti-racism is to be for people of colour.

Annaham: Go educate yourself (please!): I believe something similar applies to disability activism. That is: Those of us with disabilities are not here to make abled people feel comfortable, to hold their hands as they have a Very Special Learning Experience

On Geeks and Gays: John Graham-Cumming explains why a man who isn’t gay might still want an apology to Alan Turing.

Nancy Folbre at the NYTimes reviews the evidence around the question Do Nice Gals Finish Last? and concludes by asking “A different question comes to my mind. Shouldnâ€™t we try to reward nice behavior?”

Elizabeth Stark explains Why Mentors Matter in light of the gender gap in tech, and her own decision to avoid computer science.

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NPR’s On The Media took up the meta this weekend to discuss the issue. Their guest? Clay Shirky, assistant teacher at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. You may remember him from his Rant About Women, in which he helpfully mansplained that these kinds of institutional sexism are all our own fault really, because we’re just not prickish enough in advancing our own agenda. The fact that women can face much worse consequences than men do for behaving in the same ways – that a man gets called a prick for it, but a woman gets called a cunt – is apparently immaterial. At least to him.

The host said something like: “Let’s start by acknowledging the irony of having a man on the program to discuss this issue…” at which point, dear reader, I swore fluently, reached over and turned off the radio. No link, because GRAR. Helpful note to On The Media and to Professor Shirky: that ain’t irony. That’s malpractice. If you give a damn about women’s voices… oh, for Christ’s sake, do I actually have to spell this out? Maybe invite a woman on the show. Can’t think of anyone to suggest in your place, Professor Shirky? Biella Coleman has some great suggestions, to whom I would add… NYU Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication Biella Coleman.

THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE PEOPLE. I MEAN REALLY.

Shirky is also famous for saying: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” Way to walk the walk, dude!

Feminism vs geek culture?: liliacsigil notes that Anna N is talking about commercially produced geek media, and that geek culture is not monolithic and has many women and feminists, and returns to the issue of “strong women characters” in geek media.

Study: Pay, Promotion Limits Lead Women to Exit Engineering: ‘What’s for sure is that “it’s not about math or getting your hands dirty,” says Hunt. “It’s not because these women mistakenly wandered into engineering.'”. (Also, WTF at ad inserted into the article: “See iPhone apps for new moms.”)

Being Inclusive vs Not Being Exclusive: ‘A group of people put on some creative project, and someone notices that thereâ€™s a lack of representation of X Minority for whatever reason, sometimes noting that they themselves are in the minority. The people organising the project get defensive and say â€œBut weâ€™re not excluding anyone! We are open to everybody! They just need to sign on!â€ There is a huge difference between not being exclusive and being inclusive.’ (Via FWD.)

Research Conversations: Munmun De Choudhury writes about her computer science research on homophily in social networks, that is, similar people forming connections.

In Australia the Victorian Department of Transport is offering $10 000 Women in Transport Scholarships to female, full-time or part-time students starting or completing postgraduate studies in transport-related fields.

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